Oskar Dawicki

BORN 1971, Kraków

He is a graduate of the Fine Arts Department of the Nicholas Copernicus University in Torun (1996). In 2001-2010 he was a member of the AZORRO Supergroup. Despite his traditional arts education, he is primarily known as a performance, video, and installation artist. All of his works are post-conceptual; they cultivate a slightly grotesque, ironic, and sometimes even absurdist aura. Frequent motifs are reflections on his institutional status as a contemporary artist and on man’s mortality. Dawicki stresses that a key figure for his identity as an artist is Zbigniew Warpechowski – the Nestor of performance art in Poland.
He is the main character in the book Half Empty (2010) and the film Performer (2015).

Tree of Knowledge

The film opens with a scene in which the artist/performer enters the garden of Eden in order to repeat Adam’s sinful act. The gesture, however, is magnified to absurd dimensions: Dawicki takes a bite out of many apples, spitting out the sour flesh. The question raised here is simple: does each forbidden fruit from the tree taste the same? One of the film’s inspirations was Emil Cioran’s idea that the fruit from the tree of knowledge was unripe. The short philosophical piece is a kind of apocryphal story in which human curiosity and the temptation of sin confront the dogmas of faith. “I was obsessed with the image of an apple tree with chunks of the apples bitten off for several years,” Dawicki said in interview. “It’s one of the icons of the finality, exhaustion, void, that appear in my work in various configurations.”

Tree of Knowledge

The film opens with a scene in which the artist/performer enters the garden of Eden in order to repeat Adam’s sinful act. The gesture, however, is magnified to absurd dimensions: Dawicki takes a bite out of many apples, spitting out the sour flesh. The question raised here is simple: does each forbidden fruit from the tree taste the same? One of the film’s inspirations was Emil Cioran’s idea that the fruit from the tree of knowledge was unripe. The short philosophical piece is a kind of apocryphal story in which human curiosity and the temptation of sin confront the dogmas of faith. “I was obsessed with the image of an apple tree with chunks of the apples bitten off for several years,” Dawicki said in interview. “It’s one of the icons of the finality, exhaustion, void, that appear in my work in various configurations.”

Thousandfold oh yes

The ING Polish Art Foundation invited Oskar Dawicki to collaborate on Art in Our Time – a publication that seeks to respond to basic questions in contemporary art. The artist was asked to write an article – he was meant to explain, in an accessible way, what inspiration is, and why it is so important to an artist. Dawicki responded in his characteristic fashion: subversive, yet surprisingly sincere. The result was a work which in itself confirms the necessity of inspiration – a concept which is presently considered out-of-date, a notion which no longer applies to contemporary artists and their work.
Oskar Dawicki’s work, which was ultimately published as a chapter in the book and added to the ING collection, contains aspects that are characteristic of his work. It has humor and an ironic relationship to the reader, the artist himself, and the recommendations he makes.